Duncan Gardiner is the bridge between business leadership and engineering teams — helping organisations make sound technical decisions while keeping delivery aligned with commercial objectives.
For more than twenty years he has translated complex business, legal and operational challenges into scalable technology. He has advised enterprise clients and led multidisciplinary technical teams across the UK, Europe and the Middle East — as comfortable presenting to boards and senior executives as working alongside engineers on solution design and delivery.
Much of that work has been in data-intensive, highly regulated environments — eDiscovery, digital forensics, information governance and GDPR — across Banking, Insurance, Oil & Gas, Pharma, Mining and Manufacturing. Leading teams in London, Frankfurt and Hong Kong, he learned that the real challenge is rarely the technology alone; it is balancing cost, confidentiality and regulation to reach a workable answer.
Today he is Co-Founder and Product Architect at Evidenx, an AI-native SaaS platform, where he leads product strategy, technical architecture and AI-assisted development in Rust, Next.js and PostgreSQL. Through his consultancy, Rapu, he brings that same combination — board-level judgement and hands-on modern delivery — to founders and scale-ups as a fractional CTO and technology advisor.
A technical leader’s responsibility is not to validate assumptions, but to challenge them when the evidence suggests a better path.
What I advise on
Selected engagement
Changing course on a cross-border eDiscovery programme
Leading the technical delivery of a large international eDiscovery project across the US and Germany, Duncan challenged a review strategy the legal team had already committed to the court. The plan assumed English-speaking reviewers could handle a largely German-language collection via machine translation — but the technology could not sustain the throughput required for more than 400 concurrent reviewers. He modelled alternative workflows, presented a revised strategy with new timelines and costs, and built the technical justification the legal team needed to explain the change to the court. Changing direction early cost far less than pursuing a plan that was never grounded in technical reality.
Roles & affiliations
Credentials
Diploma, Governance Risk & Compliance — ICA
Diploma of Policing — Royal New Zealand Police College
Certified Forensic Computer Examiner (CFCE)
Certified Electronic Evidence Collection Specialist
Work with me
Fractional CTO, technology & data advisory, or a full delivery team through Rapu.